“I’ve really had no problems,” he says. “There have been occasional people who have come up and said something they may not have realized was offensive but I kind of see those as opportunities to educate people if they don’t realize that something they said wasn’t nice.”

This has become a more common practice around the country as schools decide how to interpret new federal guidance in Title IX language that extends protects to transgender students, but doesn’t say how to do it.

There are plenty of choices schools need to make when a transgender student comes out in school. And many teachers and educators are learning about it through the students.

“Sometimes they just don’t know and that’s the time you can take to explain to them and help them learn something,” Fischbach says.